Billie Joe Armstrong has a trouser problem. The Green Day singer was recently kicked off a flight on Southwest Airlines. The reason? His low-slung crotch.

"All the passengers were seated, we were ready to go, they had already told us to start to turn our cellphones off," recalled Cindy Qiu, a TV producer who was on the same flight from Oakland to Burbank, California. "A flight attendant approaches him and says, 'pull your pants up,'" Qiu explained. "He says: 'Don't you have better things to do than worry about that?' And then the flight attendant says again: 'Pull your pants up or you're getting off the plane.'" Armstrong allegedly replied: "I'm just trying to get to my fucking seat."

Southwest Airlines was not amused. The punk rocker and his travelling companion were both removed from the flight, and Armstrong was quick to unleash 140 characters of fury. "Just got kicked off a southwest flight because my pants sagged too low!" he wrote on Twitter. "What the fuck? No joke." Realising a potential PR nightmare, Southwest promptly sent its own tweet, promising their customer relations team would be "reaching out". Airline spokesman Brad Hawkins said that Southwest had apologised to the Green Day singer. Armstrong was put on the next flight, Hawkins explained, and "[we] understand from the customer the situation was resolved to his satisfaction".

This saggy saga is the latest scuffle between a high-profile low-rider and an American airline. On 12 June, a football player from the University of New Mexico was ejected from a US Airways flight over the style of his trousers. Deshon Marman is now suing the company.